D'Amico, 1
Creating an Historical Myth with The Grapes of Wrath
Mae D'Amico
The Study of History 299
November 11, 2012
I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received
unauthorized help on this work.
D'Amico, 2
As the top soil eroded and blew from the western plains, the farming people of
the Midwest, who were migrants just a couple generations before, gathered their
belongings once again and moved west to California. The migrants came from many
states, mostly Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. In the time of the great exodus on Route
66, John Steinbeck the writer of The Grapes of Wrath, chose to focus on one Oklahoman
family specifically, the Joads. In his narrative following the slow deterioration of the
family and their hardships, Steinbeck portrays the Okies in their attempt to go to
California and then their fate once they arrive. In this paper I will not try to contest the
historical occurrences addressed in The Grapes of Wrath, but rather discuss whether
Steinbeck created a historical myth of the plight of the Okies by exaggerating real events.
To set the scene of The Grapes of Wrath, the main protagonist of the novel, Tom
Joad, walks up to his farm, and for the first time in years he notices the crops bent over
from the Dust Bowl winds. This seemingly minimal observation gives rise to the first
blaring error of the novel, which is a geographical one. According to the map given in
Dust Bowl by Donald Worster, the Dust Bowl's most severe winds eroded the Pan
Handle of Oklahoma.1 To illustrate how far west the wind erosion went, the most severe
winds were also in the border regions of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. 2
The Joad family were from Salisaw, Oklahoma. Salisaw is to the extreme east, very close
to the border of Arkansas, which is very far away from the devastating wind erosion. In
another map in the book Defining Moments, the extent of the Dust Bowl is shown to
reach to the middle of Oklahoma, but nowhere near Salisaw.3
1
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl; The Southern Plains in the 1930's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) 30.
Chris Magoc, Environmental Issues in American History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006), xxxiii.
3
Kevin Hilstrom, Defining Moments; The Great Depression And the New Deal (Detroit: Omnigraphics, Inc., 2009),
60.
2
D'Amico, 3
Tom Joad, reunited with his family after a few years spent in prison is quickly
informed that the Joads will not stay for long in the home they have lived in for
generations. They had been evicted by the bank because their crops had failed and they
could not pay the bills. Their land as well as many other farms around them were being
consolidated into large industrial mono-crop cotton fields. Here is Steinbeck's second
error. We cannot blame the banks for this situation. Through the New Deal, the Works
Program Administration (WPA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) were
started in order to help farmers.4 The AAA, starting with one hundred and thirty four
million dollars, paid farmers to decrease productivity to drive up wheat prices in the
market.5 With this money the farmers were, as Bennie L. DeWhitt writes, "egged on" to
raise more cash crops with mechanized equipment, which they would buy with the
subsidies.6
The plan of the AAA was that with the thirty four million dollars, they would
subsidize farm owners, like the Joads. Unlike the Joads however, most of the farmers in
Oklahoma were not farm owners at all, but sharecroppers. The AAA theorized that with
the subsidies to the farm owners, the sharecroppers would get some of that money
through a "trickle down effect."7 Unfortunately for the sharecroppers, the "trickle down
effect" did not work. With the money to reduce their average yield, many workers were
laid off by their employers and then they had two choices, work for the WPA or try their
luck in California.
4
Dorothea Lange & Paul S. Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939),
51.
5
Michael L. Cooper, Dust To Eat; Drought and Depression in the 1930's (New York: Clarion Books, 1961), 32.
6
Bennie L. DeWhitt, "Oklahomans' Attitudes Toward John Steinbeck" (AMT dis., Oklahoma State University), 24.
7
Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest; A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981), 174.
D'Amico, 4
Due to the continuous droughts that plagued the Western Plaines from the late
1800s to the 1930s, the banks that owned the land repossessed the Joad family farm
that had been in the family for three generations. This occurrence is traumatic and
unfair for the family, as well as being the third major inaccuracy that can be found in the
novel before the Joads even start to make their journey to California. In his book
California and the Dust Bowl Migration, Walter J. Stein asserts that Oklahoma was less
than thirty years old when the Dust Bowl migration started and that the people who
lived there were very much used to migrating.8 In their travels, the Joads encounter
many more uprooted farming families much like themselves, looking for work in the
promised land of California.
In the novel, much of the attraction for migrating to California was the hope of
finding work. The father of the Joad family often mentioned the pea-picking
advertisement pamphlet, which gave him and others in the book hope of finding jobs.
The family was very concerned when they were told that there might not be much work
in California; that the fliers were a ploy by large industrial farmers to lure cheap laborers
en masse.9 In fact fewer than four percent of the migrants to California had come in
response to one of these fliers.10 To have gotten one of these fliers would make the
Joads extremely unlucky. Furthermore, those migrant families who did choose to travel
to California generally had better knowledge of what to expect when they got there. The
Joad family seemed to wander helplessly from one bad scenario to another; however,
8
Walter Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), 9.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 201.
10
Walter Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), 22.
9
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most migrants traveling to California followed a planned route to relatives already living
and settled in California.11
It is important to point out that Route 66, immortalized for bearing the Western
Migrants to California, was just a highway. It was in fact, a very direct highway that cut
across eight states. Not all those heading in the direction of California had the intention
to go there and those who were were not always going to stay. Those who did with good
automobiles could make the trip in three days. 12 Although there was a large number of
migrating agricultural families from mostly the Western regions, there was an equally
large number of non-agricultural families traveling from as far as Michigan.13 Most of
the families in The Grapes of Wrath make it clear that their intention is to stay in
California. A significant number, however, were just migrant workers or passing
through to see family.14 Many migrant workers went to California to work in the winters
and then returned to Oklahoma to work in the spring and summers. 15
Eventually, The Joads make it to California but only after much hardship. At first
they come to a Hooverville that is overcrowded and dirty with little work to be found.
The family is quick to leave however, because the local police come and burn it down to
"move the laborers along." It should be noted that police were only allowed to enter
migrant camps at the request of health authorities.16 Afterwards, they travel to a Farm
Security Administration (FSA) camp near Bakersfield.17 There were two goals in these
11
Gregory, American Exodus, 28.
James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York, Oxford
University press, 1989), 18.
13
Gregory, American Exodus, 33.
14
Ibid., 32.
15
DeWhitt, Oklahoman's Attitudes, 20
16
Ibid., 15.
17
Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, 285.
12
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government sponsored camps: to provide sanitary places to live for workers and show
the Okies how to live in a self-governed environment, outside state jurisdiction.18
The camps are well suited for the Joads, but not being able to find work, they
must have to move on. Steinbeck wrote about the FSA camp in particular to draw
national attention to how inadequate the relief being given to the migrants were. 19
Although it is possible that the Joads would have ended up in one of these camps, they
were generally only populated by the very new to California or the very poor. 20
Steinbeck correctly articulated the stigma against the FSA camps. There was a one year
residency rule, the migrants usually had to travel around to find work, and their
employers were weary of them for giving rise to union organizers. It is amazing that the
Joads ended up in an FSA camp, rather than the infamous communities called "Little
Oklahomas" or "Okievilles."
There was one such Little Oklahoma in Bakersfield at that time. Unlike the
impression that The Grapes of Wrath gives of the migrants from Oklahoma, most came
to California with the intention of buying land for homes and then did exactly that. 21
There is no mention of these communities in The Grapes of Wrath. Little Oklahomas
did not go unnoticed by the population of California at the time, they were actually quite
resented for being on the outskirts of society, having ugly and poor makeshift homes,
and for being made up entirely of Okies.22 Perhaps the reason the Joads never made it
to one of these communities is that they were just that poor. That does seem to be the
18
Where Steinbeck learned about the camps was from a famous social worker who orchestrated one himself to
learn more about Okie culture, Tom Collins. The Book The Grapes of Wrath is dedicated to "Tom, who lived it."
Stein, California, 166.
19
Cladia D. Johnson, Understanding The Grapes of Wrath: a Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 101.
20
Gregory, American Exodus, 143.
21
Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 148-149.
22
Gregory, American Exodus, 143.
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point of Steinbeck's novel, although he got it across by exaggeration of living conditions,
that there was not enough relief for the very poor migrant workers like the Joads. The
book ends with a very bleak outlook on the way the Joad family will survive the coming
years with no money and the growing season over for that year. Luckily for the real
migrants of the Dust Bowl in California, the economy will come back around just a year
later and then continue that trend until the mass mobilization of World War Two. 23
It is important to discuss the various sources I have used for this paper because
they are representing Steinbeck's historical myth. With their works, the various authors
try to prove how Steinbeck made inaccuracies, exaggerations, or influenced history's
memory of the Dust Bow. Peter Lisca in his book The Wide World of John Steinbeck
points out that The Grapes of Wrath never had a chance at being accepted as a piece of
fiction. The lines between social documentary and novel were so blurred it was accepted
as fact right away.24 In fact, many of the books I have used for research mention that
The Grapes of Wrath portrays accurately the plight of the migrant workers who traveled
to California.25 Additionally, Steinbeck was not the only artist through popular media
who pushed the plight of the Okie Problem into mainstream awareness.
In the book Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination by Charles J.
Shindo, He examines other secondary sources, pictures, as well as books like The Grapes
of Wrath. A large part of Shindo's books also gives credit to the Dust Bowl making its
way into popular media through Dorathea Lange, with her picture documentaries of the
23
John Higham, Strangers in a Strange Land: Patterns of Nativismm 1860-1925 (New Brunswick and London:
Rutgers University Press, 1988), 329
24
Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 148-149.
25
Stein, California, 19; Worster, Dust Bowl, 44; Cooper, Dust to Eat, 69; Barbara A. Heavilin (ed), The Critical
Response to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000) 72; Charles Shindo, Dust
Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 2; Hilstrom, Defining
moments, 73.
D'Amico, 8
Dust Bowl and Woodie Guthrie, who produced numerous famous folk songs expressing
the migrants hardship.26 John Ford's movie adaption of The Grapes of Wrath brings the
issue to much more of a mainstream media as it is much easier to watch a movie than
read.27 Shindo concludes that the entire cultural understandings of the Dust Bowl
migration and its effects on California cannot be accurately portrayed by texts and
images alone.28
In Bennie L. DeWhitt's master's degree thesis, Oklahomans' Attitudes Toward
John Steinbeck, DeWhitt gives a strikingly unusual account of what the population of
Oklahoma thought of Steinbeck's Nobel Prize winning novel. Most wrote it off as an
embarrassing inaccurate representation of Oklahoman people, but as the book gathered
more attention, opinions turned more sour. Why was there such an outcry against
Steinbeck's novel? People believed it. With his dissertation, DeWhitt inserts numerous
newspaper clippings, letters to the governor, and speeches giving their reaction to the
novel. The first response to The Grapes of Wrath in the Oklahoman press was entitled,
"Grapes of Wrath, Obscenity and Inaccuracy."29 DeWhitt points out that if Steinbeck
had made a documentary rather than a novel, it might have gotten a more rational
reaction, but it is a fictional novel, and therefore "became fair game for all."
There is of course a counterargument to the one that I have proposed, and
truthfully, it is a good one. The Grapes of Wrath is a novel, and a novel by definition is a
piece of fiction. Steinbeck had the artistic right to exaggerate the events of the Dust
Bowl as much as he wanted to. What Steinbeck did with his book was not maliciously
26
Shindo, Dust Bowl, 184.
DeWhitt, Oklahomans' Attitudes, 16.
28
Shindo, Dust Bowl, 222.
29
DeWhitt actually wrote his thesis on Oklahomans' attitudes towards The Grapes of Wrath as a student of
Oklahoma State University. For the purposes of this paper, there is really no better sources for how Oklahomans'
felt about the book and how it affected them. DeWhitt, Oklahomans' Attitudes, 11.
27
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done, far from it. The reaction that it brought from the American public was
consciously made.30 What he wanted was "something like participation" from his
audience.31 Some have commented that the novel was one "wherein naturalism has
gone berserk."32 In his book, Lisca opposes this argument by concluding that one
should not just focus on minute historical inaccuracies to try and tear down The Grapes
of Wrath. Steinbeck wrote about the injustice of the situations between the migrants of
the West and the people of California is from a naturalistic point of view, all people are
made up of the same things, and that all people are equal in the struggle of life everyone
faces.
Lisca's conclusion is one I agree with. Although Steinbeck did exaggerate certain
facts about the Okies and the extent of their plight in their journeys to California, the
real people, the ones that Lange captured with her images, and the ones Woody Guthrie
sang about were real. There were people who had "the worst hard time" as Timothy
Egan puts it. Some people of Oklahoma cried out in outrage at Steinbeck's novel, saying
that it gave their state a bad name, but we must remember the migrants that had to
make the journey to California. Take the famous picture of a despairing pea-picker
mother and her children taken by Lange.33 Would anyone who faced such hardship not
want others to know of what they endured? Steinbeck in his own way immortalized the
Okies with his historical myth. He made them an unforgettable part of American
history.
30
Michael P. Malone & Richard W. Etulain, The American West; A Twentieth-Century History (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989), 178.
31
Heavilin, The Critical Response, 120.
32
Lisca, The Wide World, 150.
33
Bill Ganzel, Dust Bowl Decent (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 31.
D'Amico, 10
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